Kiwi doo­dle a win­ner with Google

A love of art and ex­per­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent medi­ums and de­signs has made Emily Foun­tain a win­ner.

The Ep­som Girls Gram­mar School stu­dent en­tered the Doo­dle 4 Google art com­pe­ti­tion in Au­gust af­ter her mum saw it ad­ver­tised in the Cen­tral Leader.

“I looked on their web­site and was in­ter­ested be­cause the prizes were not only for the artist but also for their school,” she says.

“The theme had to be My New Zealand, so I had the idea of us­ing a mass of Kiwi icons to make up a kiwi bird and putting Google in­side the kiwi. This way, Google is one part of lots of dif­fer­ent fea­tures of New Zealand life.”

Thou­sands of en­tries were re­ceived from more than 600 schools across New Zealand and Emily’s detailed draw­ing was se­lected as one of 20 fi­nal­ists.

There were five fi­nal­ists in her year 9 to 10 cat­e­gory in­clud­ing Molly Ploeg from Im­manuel Chris­tian School in Avon­dale.

Zachary Helm from Bal­moral School was also a fi­nal­ist in the year 4 to 6 cat­e­gory.

All the fi­nal­ists were flown to Welling­ton for the grand fi­nal event at Te Papa where orig­i­nal Google doo­dler Den­nis Hwang an­nounced the win­ners se­lected through an on­line pub­lic vot­ing poll.

“My school en­cour­aged the stu­dents to vote and my fam­ily let peo­ple know they should go vote too,” Emily says. “They had the winning doo­dles on th­ese huge can­vases up the front and they un­veiled them one at a time. I couldn’t be­lieve it when mine ap­peared. I was shocked.”

Emily’s prize in­cluded a Mac­book Pro lap­top and an elec­tronic white­board for her school.

“It’s been great to get an un­der­stand­ing of what in­flu­ences the next gen­er­a­tion of Ki­wis, and it’s cer­tainly some­thing I’ll be tak­ing back to our de­sign room,” Mr Dun­stan says.

“What came through loud and clear for me in all the doo­dles is a pa­tri­otic pride and love for our clean and green life­style, from re­cy­cling and nu­clear-free sym­bols through to na­tive forests and grassy land­scapes.